Day: 035
Date: Tuesday, 05 July 2022
Start: Gargrave
Finish: Hebden Bridge
Daily Kilometres: 40
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1028
Weather: Cool to mild, breezy, and partly sunny.
Accommodation: Hostel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Breakfast sandwiches
Lunch: Cheese & ham sandwich/Cheese sandwich
Dinner: Pasta bolognese, banana & butterscotch pudding & icecream
Aches: Dave - a few niggles. Julie - nothing to report
Highlight: The hike across windswept, desolate and featureless Ickornshaw Moor in the middle of the day was special. We felt like we were on top of the world and had the moor to ourselves.
Lowlight: Arriving at our unmanned hostel after a long day’s hiking, keen to have showers and eat, to find the room we had been assigned (by email) was already occupied and nobody answering their phones. We were about to go and find somewhere else to stay when one last call was answered and a new, unoccupied, room assigned.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We left the pretty village of Gargrave soon after 6:00am, aware that we had a long day and keen not to arrive too late in Hebden Bridge, our next stop. Not knowing how difficult the trail will be or how hard the hills, makes predicting arrival times a challenge.
Most of the morning’s walking was through rolling farmland, with plenty of ups and downs, and a short stint along a canal. The weather and grass pastures were dry for a change and we enjoyed the bucolic scenery. After the village of Cowling we climbed high onto Ickornshaw Moor and enjoyed the sense of remoteness (see above) even though we could see it was surrounded by villages and towns when we had the chance to look down.
While stopped for lunch, and given our relatively slow pace because of the terrain, we decided to follow the route suggested by our navigation app, which was four kilometres shorter, for the final section to Hebden Bridge rather than the guidebook route or the Pennine Way. It worked out well, though some of the trail was very steep and other parts seemed little-used. We got to see the gentle Bronte Falls, follow an old aqueduct with dress-circle views over Yorkshire and Lancashire, and finally cross another moor.
The last part of the afternoon saw us descend steadily to Hebden Bridge through farmland and then pretty woodland before we entered the very hilly town. As luck would have it, there was a steep climb up to our hostel, where we arrived soon after 6:00pm, and then we had trouble checking in (see above). Julie was a saint and trekked down into the town to buy some microwavable dinner while Dave sorted out the room mix-up. It was a later day than we had hoped, but not too bad and the scenery was again spectacular.
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